Lazlo Little and the Midwestern Wasteland
by Treeborn Dreamer
Summary: Lazlo Little's story of how he became the most famous ghoul in the Midwestern Wasteland, and what he does next.


So, I've taken a bit of a break from Naruto and moved into one of my other loves: Fallout. I've been going crazy waiting for details about Fallout Four, and writing this helped me get some of that out of my system. If this gets a positive reaction, I'll continue it, and I will continue updating Tales from Training and The Will of Fire, my Naruto fanfictions, alongside it. Review if you like it and want to see more!

Lazlo Little and the Midwestern Wasteland

Treeborn Dreamer

For ten days, I watched the sky rain fire and death upon us, and I wept for the death of God; no benevolent and all-powerful deity would allow his children to massacre each other as we did, and I cried as the flesh melted off my bones but did not die.

Before the fires, I was an engineer for the Vault-Tec Vault system, an expansive shelter system underneath the surface of the Earth in case of nuclear war. The jobs it brought to my home of Kansas City were welcome, and the work across the country brought us from the brink of a major recession as news of escalating tensions with Russia, China, and North Korea blared on the radio and television. My job was hard, with long hours and little time off to see my family, but the assurance of safety made me feel like a hero at the time; I was an architect of the future of humanity, and that future would definitely include the descendants of Lazlo Little. Those descendants began with my daughter, Mary, a year old when the project began, and just shy of eighteen when we needed it. Little did I know that it would have been better to die outside it than live inside it.

Nearly twelve years after the completion of the vault, sirens blared and children screamed. I took Mary's hand and hurried her to the entrance of the vault, designated Vault 39, calling for my wife as I did so. My calls were lost in a sea of shouts and cries, and the shelter's max occupancy was met before my Julie could make it, and as the first bomb fell I saw her being locked out by the great steel door which would not budge for five years.

The vault did nothing more than hold off the brunt of the explosions; the radiation seeped into us, boiled our skin slowly as we cried and railed against the uncaring heavens. I saw men die and women lose their minds, and I stopped feeling the urges of humanity as endless days of nuclear rain and acid warped the earth above us.

For five years, we stayed hidden in the vault, food sitting untouched as we devolved from humans into something worse. Most of us kept our wits about us, but a few lost themselves to the savagery hidden deep in their hearts, and we had to put down our friends and neighbors, one-by-one, as the years wore on and we decayed.

I remember one morning where I awoke to a quiet sobbing from the corner of the room where Mary normally slept. I rolled over to check on her, and I left a large chunk of my arm behind as I did so. No other moment, to me, so accurately sums up the torment we lived through in those wretched years, alone with our misery and deformity.

When those years had finally ended, and the vault door opened on its own, we emerged to a world scarred and deformed as badly as we had been; the earth was hard and darkened, trees were all but nonexistent, and water was undrinkable; when I saw the state of our once-lovely country, I fell to my knees and wept for the evils of man's lust for power and dominance.

The survivors of Vault 39 dispersed out into the world, and soon all that remained near the shelter were Mary and I. For a few months, we searched through the remains of our city for survivors and usable technology, although after a while we gave up on that fruitless search. I suggested we stay in the vault, but Mary hated the very mention of it, so we scavenged and scraped together an above-ground shack, and when it was finished, we built a barn in much the same way. When a building was finished, we would repair the older ones and then begin a new one. Soon, in the ruins of our suburban home, a new city began to spring up, built by our own hands over the course of months and years.

Travelers would occasionally pass by our home, once or twice a year, and they would either scream and flee from us, or attempt to "relieve us of our torment" as one particularly-pious would-be murderer phrased it. Mary and I drove off the attackers and ignored the terrified, and we built our home as large and as beautiful as we could.

And so the years dragged on and on. We built our home as large as we could, to keep our hands busy as we waited for something, anything... I don't even know what we were waiting for. But it happened.

First one, then two, then five. Others like us, flesh falling from their bodies and hearts seeking companionship, began knocking on my door, asking for shelter and my protectorship. I turned no one away, and every hand that knocked on my door, I shook and offered a hammer.

Each one came from all over, each had stories to tell, and we all laughed as we worked, building more out of the wreckage, building them bigger as more of us sought shelter with Mary and I. And as more refugees showed up, we learned what humanity thought of us.

Ghoul. Zombie. Or worse... The refugees all told tales of abuse and fear, and I was shocked at how universal the anger against us seemed to be. I swore to every man and woman that stepped into my compound that no one would come to harm under my watch. And as our numbers swelled, some brought weapons and some brought special skills, and we created our city, two thousand strong. We built churches for those few who still believed, an enormous meeting hall to meet and vote, stores to barter supplies, and lived as peacefully as we could.

Every once in a while, some asshole came up and tried to start shit, but mostly we lived in seclusion, behind our brand-new walls and away from the old highway system. And now, nearly two hundred years after the bombs fell, we are probably the largest city anywhere in the scarred world, and I am proud of everything I have done here.

-Lazlo Little, in a note left in his home before he disappeared


End file.
